Nora’s owner, a piano teacher, has other cats, but they are not interested in playing the piano. A video of Nora playing the piano posted on YouTube turned her into an Internet superstar! Why, we ask, does a cat imitating a human pianist command such attention, when a human child doing the same thing would be relegated to a collection of a neighbor’s boring home videos?
Clearly, humans do not expect cats, or any animal, to behave like them. Or more, to exhibit any genuine human-like intelligence at all. Students of Theosophy marvel too, but they also recognize in the phenomena, evidence for the far wider view of evolution as implied in a comment by spiritual teacher Helena Blavatsky in her magnum opus The Secret Doctrine:
Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize — of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there. There is no such thing as either “dead” or “blind” matter, as there is no “Blind” or “Unconscious” Law.– (The Secret Doctrine 1:274)
Watch and judge for yourself:
That’s smaaart! Also warm, cuddly, and certainly cute. What about compassion for others, acting beyond our personal self, or heroic sacrifice? Chimps, elephants, porpoises, and many other animals have exhibited such behaviors. Check out the following clip of Leo the dog and ask yourself, how many of us could match the courage and caring of this pint-sized spiritual being?
Have Animals Souls?
Two religions, now the oldest in the world, Hinduism and Buddhism regard the animal world—from the huge quadruped down to the infinitesimally small insect—as their “younger brothers” …H. P. Blavatsky
